Ohanian, Melik (FR/AM)
Carlsberg Tap E
Melik Ohanian
Born 1969 in Lyon, France
Lives in Paris
Melik Ohanian's previous works include Invisible Film (2005): a film about a screening of a film, namely Peter Watkins's 1971 chilling pseudo-documentary Punishment Park, which depicts a future USA scenario where dissidents are interned in camps. Ohanian screened Watkins's film in the Californian desert where it was made, but his artistic involvement consisted in projecting the film out into the desert at sunset, but without the screen. While the soundtrack could be heard, all that could be seen of the film, once darkness had fallen, were shimmers of light - prompting us perhaps to think of other things we don't get to see, such as the internment camps of our own times. In a related work, Ohanian combines recent footage shot in Santiago, Chile with the soundtrack to documentary maker Patricio Guzmán's 1973 film about the military coup in Chile.
Ohanian, then, engages with political issues and with one of the key problems of
political historiography: that we do not see everything. This is hardly news. But
Ohanian probes it insistently because politics has changed. When political decisions impact on people's lives on the other side of the globe, politics has changed radically. These issues are currently being debated in France under the label cosmopolitics, which in reaction to contemporary globalization and climate change argues that the limits of politics need to be rethought.
It is these fundamental displacements that Ohanian seeks to illuminate in, for
instance, the interventions that he occasionally makes in the public realm - by
turning off the street lighting or, for a brief moment, creating daylight in the middle of the night. Melik Ohanian consistently interrogates stark dichotomies, often focused around issues of presence, function and visibility, as exemplified by his contribution to U-TURN - Relative Time (2008), a clock showing the 24 hours
and 37 minutes rotation of the planet Mars. -NH
Lives in Paris
Melik Ohanian's previous works include Invisible Film (2005): a film about a screening of a film, namely Peter Watkins's 1971 chilling pseudo-documentary Punishment Park, which depicts a future USA scenario where dissidents are interned in camps. Ohanian screened Watkins's film in the Californian desert where it was made, but his artistic involvement consisted in projecting the film out into the desert at sunset, but without the screen. While the soundtrack could be heard, all that could be seen of the film, once darkness had fallen, were shimmers of light - prompting us perhaps to think of other things we don't get to see, such as the internment camps of our own times. In a related work, Ohanian combines recent footage shot in Santiago, Chile with the soundtrack to documentary maker Patricio Guzmán's 1973 film about the military coup in Chile.
Ohanian, then, engages with political issues and with one of the key problems of
political historiography: that we do not see everything. This is hardly news. But
Ohanian probes it insistently because politics has changed. When political decisions impact on people's lives on the other side of the globe, politics has changed radically. These issues are currently being debated in France under the label cosmopolitics, which in reaction to contemporary globalization and climate change argues that the limits of politics need to be rethought.
It is these fundamental displacements that Ohanian seeks to illuminate in, for
instance, the interventions that he occasionally makes in the public realm - by
turning off the street lighting or, for a brief moment, creating daylight in the middle of the night. Melik Ohanian consistently interrogates stark dichotomies, often focused around issues of presence, function and visibility, as exemplified by his contribution to U-TURN - Relative Time (2008), a clock showing the 24 hours
and 37 minutes rotation of the planet Mars. -NH